Baltimore Co. Man Charged With Trading Child Porn Images

BALTIMORE (WJZ)—Federal authorities say hundreds of people traded tens of thousands of pornographic images of children. One of the men charged is from Baltimore County.

Mike Hellgren has the investigation.

The website was called Dreamboard, a place where federal authorities say 600 people around the world traded child porn.

The U.S government charged 72 of them in a wide-ranging investigation, including 34-year-old Desmond Meredith from Freeland in Baltimore County.

The Feds refer to him as John Doe #7. His online name was “Beast.”

Charging documents reveal in 2009 and 2010, he offered to distribute child porn, including a title called “Angelica and Friends.”

“Some of the children featured in these images and video were just infants. And in many cases the children being victimized were in obvious and intentional pain,” said Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General.

The site has since been shut down. Among its strict rules– you must contribute child sex videos to participate. The most prolific porn producers were rewarded.

“Membership status was upgraded for those who produced and shared their own child porn and videos,” said Janet Napolitano, DHS Secretary.

Among those arrested, Tennessee police officer Richard Chandler and Virginia high school football coach Joseph “Matt” Wheeler.

April Greenway has children in Wheeler’s school district.

“Usually it’s the people you think you can trust the most, you really can’t trust,” she said.

“It’s very scary the way that technology is these days how one image of a child can really be broadcast to any number of people,” said Shannon Noe, child abuse victim’s counselor.

More than 500 suspected Dreamboard users are still on the loose–many beyond the reach of the law.

According to several published reports, Meredith has previously been in psychiatric care.

Investigators are going through a huge amount of material—the equivalent of 16,000 DVDs— to ID possible child victims.

Mike HellgrenWJZ Investigator Mike Hellgren came to WJZ in the spring of 2004 from KARK-TV, an NBC affiliate station in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he worked as a...More fromMike Hellgren